Oolite Bulletins

One of the good things about the old energy bomb was that it was difficult to fire it accidentally. There are missions where you really need the same sort of punch, and with it gone the only way is to buy a mine and try not to blow yourself up. But if you carry something like that routinely, sooner or later you are going to fire the damn thing when you meant to launch an ordinary missile, or press the launch button accidentally while firing a laser. It also uses a precious missile slot, and missiles are usually a lot more useful.

Is there any way these bombs could be launched by a different key to ordinary missiles, or otherwise made a little less suicidal? Or moved to the hard point formerly occupied by energy bombs, freeing the missile slot and launching with Tab?

If you want the old one-shot and not surely lethal energy bomb on tab key then install EnergyBomb OXP. This will not allocate any missile slots.

If you want step over the default rules (which reduce your missile slots when you carry a Q-Bomb) then there is a Missile Machine in [wiki]Armoury_OXP[/wiki] which produce new ones in flight from radioactives and alloys.

I dimly remember an OXP which provide revolver-like missile handling to get a few times more slots, maybe others can tell where it is.

I have an idea how to make a safety function to Q-Bomb at OXP level using dumb mines as placeholder (to avoid changing game mechanics) and a primable equipment to arm these. I can add this to my queue of user requests if you want.

Norby wrote:

I dimly remember an OXP which provide revolver-like missile handling to get a few times more slots, maybe others can tell where it is.

Missile Racks, also to be found in Armoury oxp.

I think the safety catch idea sounds best - I don't want to carry more mines/missiles than the game allows, and I think that dropping the energy bomb was a good idea - but some scenarios written before this change really seem to need it. If the Q-mine is the only available replacement, and I've got one aboard, I REALLY don't want to set it off accidentally.

SafetyCatch is done.

And works well, but I think it should cost a bit more - since it also does something automatically that would normally cost 20 credits!

Also, I just got charged 0 credits to repair it, which seems a bit strange.

The v1.1 of SafetyCatch is fixed both due to equipment repairs costs the half of the price by default, so you will be billed by 10Cr for a repair from now.

Sounds more reasonable - and people like things more if they have to pay for them.

Finally used this in anger today - fighting three Thargoids, two fugitives and a load of Thargoid fighter robots in a dense asteroid belt, they thought they had me outgunned but insisted on following me when I ran. Got the lot! And I suspect would have fired the thing prematurely if it hadn't had the safety catch.